In this debut album, Tokyo experimental five-piece Haimidori show obvious echoes of 1980s Bristol post-punks The Pop Group in the discordant sax farts, as well as the mixture of funk, punk and strangled vocals; but, they are by no means limited by those influences. ...

Osaka postpunk quartet Yolz in the Sky’s new album “Ionization” follows on from the best moments of their self-titled 2007 debut with a series of insistent dance beats and reverb-heavy guitars underscoring the relentless harangue of the echoing, ranting vocals. This time, however, Yolz ...

“There was this one guy whose name meant something like ‘flat’ in English, but Google translated it into Swedish as ‘lesbian’, which caused me a bit of confusion at first.” Booking shows in Japan with only online translation software to help throws up a ...

Old school: Notable for Koichi Makigami’s distinctive, Kabuki-influenced vocal style, Hikashu were, alongside P-Model and The Plastics, one of the defining bands of Japanese new wave and technopop, although from their poppy debut they quickly tacked in a more experimental direction. At Drive to ...

It’s Aug. 28, 1979, and the audience dutifully files into the old Shinjuku Loft livehouse to take their places, seated on the floor in preparation for another night of quiet musical appreciation. This time, however, something strange starts to happen. People keep coming in, ...

Yasutaka Nakata is bouncing around like some kind of postmodern electro Tigger in front of a sea of adoring fans, almost uniformly young, beautiful and well-dressed. His DJ set taken in large part from his group capsule’s own music, with the odd track thrown ...

Best known as the drummer from Japanese rap-rock band Rize, but also having made a name for himself as an actor, Nobuaki Kaneko delivers his first solo album caught between his position as a relative newcomer as a musical mastermind and a celebrity status ...

In a pop industry where music is usually a mere marketing tool to help sell an idol’s image, Japan’s busiest producer, Nakata Yasutaka, has pulled off a rare success by the way his music utterly subsumes the identities of Perfume’s three female members, turning ...

“We were really worried before they came over ‘cos England’s so s–t,” says Rob Rolfe, the drummer from British post-hardcore/metal/dance fusion band Enter Shikari of their anxieties before embarking on a 2008 tour with their friends, the Japanese punk-metal group Maximum the Hormone. “The ...

With a reputation for furious, hypnotic live performances, and a sound that evades all attempts to pin it down with the usual genre cliches, Tokyo-based duo Kirihito have gradually carved themselves a position as legends in the underground-music scene despite only releasing albums sporadically ...